BEDU

75 million jobs will disappear in the next 5 years; 133 million jobs will be created. Those jobs require people to constantly learn new skills. Due to their inherent structures, universities and online providers can’t solve this problem. 

BEDU teaches technology, business, and language courses integrated with career skills. Students learn theory online and then attend classroom sessions 6 hours a week to deepen their understanding and work on real world challenges. Experts are practitioners; we train them in active learning and project based learning methodologies, which they use to support students to create projects during the sessions. We build employable profiles and support our students by playing matchmaker with recruiters. 

If BEDU could offer their more programs with specialization in: technology, business, and language, with an effective methodology as a blended remote guarantees millions of participants will be ready to scale professionally or access better professional opportunities

We identified an opportunity to better training conditions in a digital era that demands the acceleration of the learning of new abilities and the creation of a whole new profile, one that didn't exist in the past.

A great opportunity for professionals alike in the area of professional preparation. 90% of companies say that they have difficulty finding trained candidates. Furthermore, workers are conscious of this insufficiency. 1 in every 5 candidates, feels that they lack all the skills required for their position.

This situation has accelerated the growth of training in general, and above all, online. However, it has been proven that this type of model isn't effective. 9 out of every 10 that take online courses abandon their studies.   

To make matters worse, the training programs that are truly effective, or that provide quality training on up-to-date topics tend to be costly and nearly inaccessible for the majority of people in Mexico. Making the options available to this public almost null.   

BEDU focuses on prepared these professionals with high expectations of growth, with one of the most effective methods of learning, in order to impulse their career opportunities and salaries.

BEDU is improving upon the blended model and making it scalable by strengthening its remote and in-person delivery with four unique components:

1. Content: BEDU has one of the most robust platforms in EdTech and Business with more than 500 updated and diverse content lines, all created with the input of the best subject matter experts for each topic and a team of top instructional designers and educators.  

2. Technology: BEDU achieves scalability and flexibility through its artificial intelligence based digital platform where it hosts all of its interactive learning content available for students to reinforce their learning in a flexible way.

3. Active experts: We have industry experts who transmit their knowledge in a effective ¨flipped classroom¨ method, whether it be remotely or in-person, that allows for bi-directional interaction to help students apply what they learned previously on the digital platform.

4Learning in real time: we understands that to learn one does not just require good content, but also personal interaction. For that reason, we have invested in modalities that allow for personal interaction in real time, personal or online format, between students and experts, regardless of whether the course is being taught in-person or remotely.  

https://bedu.org/blog/educacion/capacitacion-en-linea-para-todos-si-pero-efectiva-1/ 

In BEDU we constantly develop qualitative and quantitative research before launching a new product.  Our UX research consist in define the goals, select people and start with the research. 

Additionally we make focus group, surveys, one o one interview, contextual observation in order to have a deep understanding to our user.  

Thanks to our research we've  able to detect user’s psychology and behavioral characteristics 

For example, we found that the most of the people we serve are low income students who are interested in learning or improve their tech and digital skills. They wish to have access at better jobs and increase their opportunities for have a better quality of life . Most of them have a bachelor degree but the knowledge that they acquired in university nowadays it’s not enough to apply at better job positions.

They currently have a job, so they don’t have enough time to prepared themselves. They need to have an accessible, flexible and effective educational platform to improve their abilities. 

In 2019 alone, 150,000 Tech jobs went unfilled in Mexico due to a serious skills gap. Candidates lack the hard and soft skills necessary to meet the needs of these jobs. For this reason, Bedu has developed a 360° training solution that provides students with the qualifications the new market requires. We provide a remote blended learning solution that trains students in critical thinking, communication, programming, design, and business. Instead of focusing solely on theory, students have the opportunity to ideate, design, and build prototypes that generate the exact mindset they need to thrive in an ever-changing and unpredictable market.  

  The problem that we are solving is a multi-faceted one. Not only are we closing the digital skills gap, but we are helping our users to become effective leaders within the Tech space. Many of our competitors offer bootcamps that focus solely on the hard skills of technology, ignoring other important soft skills like communication, teamwork, emotional intelligence, and more. Our solution ensures that our graduates are able to not only navigate the Tech industry with ease, but easily confront any challenge that comes their way. This approach is innovative in that it tackles the problem from every angle. We are leveraging the best of technology and educational methodologies to create well-rounded effective professionals.

BEDU integrates a tripartite distributed system, which allows us to have flexibility in luring and capturing users (companies and students), enable and manage of proprietary and third party content and  finally allow us to manage operations/students.Our educational technology platform was developed considering the blended model at the core of functionality, therefore a microlearning  measurement system was developed that helps us analyze the learning behaviours of students at key moments of online and offline participation.This data is analyzed so relevant information is delivered for the BEDU product and marketing teams, which generates a virtuous circle to improve the hole learning experience.. But the greatest benefit is obtained by our students, since we integrate a AI driven recommendation systems as well as a dynamic learning profile, Talent Builder. This data and AI base lets us have in the roadmap the development of a learning AI assistants, that bust the interactions and learning in the blended methodology.

https://projects.invisionapp.com/share/38VMN8A672T#/screens/413820654 

In Mexico, we are experiencing a serious skills gap in the areas of technology. There is a huge demand in the areas of data analysis, UX design, and programming, however many employers have difficulty finding qualified candidates for these jobs. Candidates are either lacking the necessary hardskills to do the job or the necessary soft skills to do well. This skills gap comes as the result of a lack of access to quality education in Mexico. It´s very difficult for the average Mexican to upskill in the areas of technology and digital literacy because there are few affordable, effective options. It´s even more difficult for them to develop the soft skills necessary to access higher level positions. As part of our theory of change model, our inputs are workshops and classes that will train our students in the hard skills they need such as programming, data analysis, user design, entrepreneurship, and English. They learn these skills through active learning which forces them to evaluate and develop essential soft skills like communication, collaboration, problem solving, critical thinking, and more. At the end of each training module they must design and develop a project and present it to their peers and other members of the Bedu community. This allows them to apply their newly acquired knowledge and convert it into a tangible deliverable. By presenting this project, students develop pride in their work, they learn how to present demos, and how to receive, and incorporate feedback. Upon graduation, our students become mentors passing their knowledge and skills on to the next generation. Our desired output is to revolutionize technology education making it accessible and effective for any Mexican who would like to enter into the tech industry and transform it for the better.

Bedu has 67 employees full time and 153 industry experts, part time.

We currently operate in four cities in Mexico. In 2021 we will expand internationally. We will also expand our course offerings to better serve students and companies. We recently launched a remote-blended model, which allows us to attract students from other geographies, an opportunity that we aim to capitalize on as a key source of growth.

The next five years we will detonate the potential of talent, developing professional skills in more than 20 thousand professionals in our region, with a change in the educational experience, which revolutionizes the teaching method to make it more effective, accessible, and flexible.

1. People in Mexico and Latin America don’t usually invest in their own continuous education. We need to increase awareness about the importance of developing new skills to be competitive in the digital economy.

2. In the region there is a strong belief and respect for traditional education vs new models, such as bootcamps, blended and remote solutions. We need to rapidly change the perception of those models and involve more people and decision makers from public and private sectors.

3. Bedu’s brand recognition is low. We must increase awareness and visibility by leading the conversation on ed-tech and talent development, as well as promoting our advocacy on new education models.

4. Companies don’t know how to train their employees. It is both an opportunity but also a challenge because they prefer to aim their resources to traditional training programs and conventional models, such as coaching and 100% online training.

5. Our budget is not enough to accelerate the technology and product development process as we would like to do it. we need to strengthen our team for being step ahead market's needs

We'll launch awareness campaigns in order to spread the big challenge of re-skilling and up-skilling learning. 

We will invested in boosting our user research, with this data we'll build  effective and efficient fixes in our platform. We'll focus on improve our experiences in a very efficient way. 

We will continue to build strong relationships with business community in no only for increasing sales opportunities, but also to boost our brand, method and reputation.

Bedu has 67 employees full time and 153 industrial experts. 

BEDU’s employees are top talent specialist in educations and technology. Most of them came from Startup world and they have experiences for working in accelerate business.

We have a pull of educational developers who design our materials  and content programs. All fo them have experience working in a leadership positions in educational institutions 

BEDU has more than 20 collaborate and commercial partnerships to make the benefits of our programs immense. These partnerships have been signed with universities, state and municipal education organizations, commercial banks, startups, media companies, business communities, design firms, entrepreneurial and tech companies, and nonprofit organizations, among others.   

In addition, Pluralsight es a content partner with BEDU, which allows us to achieve a vast educational offering. 

Finally, BEDU has a partnership with around 30 employment companies with whom we share the profiles of our graduates to provide them with professional opportunities. Every three months, BEDU organizes its Prototype event where students present their technical projects before employers.   

We have two ways to revenue. We sell our programas direct consumers and we develop re-skilling programs for companies.

Business Solutions represent a majority of our revenue. Using our core competency, we help companies solve their talent shortcomings. We either retrain their existing employees or find individuals with the right profile and provide last-mile training to fill open positions. 

We sale our courses to our target users and provide them with different financing schemes for them to afford our offering.  Our blended approach allows us to offer our educational services at a price up to 60% lower than traditional educational opportunities.  We have raised a Series A financing round from international investors and we are en route to a Series B financing round. We'll achieve profitability by increasing the number of groups on every single location we have presence to at least 10-12 groups per month, each of them with 10-15 students. Corporate expenses are destined mainly to product development, technology and marketing expenses. Over the medium term we are aiming to be present in al major locations in Latin America.

The Solve support will help Bedu to invest in awareness campaigns to reach more people who could potentially invest in developing their skills. 

Additionally, this support will help us to seal strategic alliances with key stakeholders such as NGO’s and public and private institutions, which would promote awareness campaigns related to up-skilling and re-skilling education in order to meet the demand of digital economy.

Funding will help Bedu to attract more top talent in order to improve our user research and optimize our tech platform, enhancing the user experience of our clients and students and strengthening the ecosystem of companies that support our initiative.

Our allies will help us to widen our vision of the business by finding areas in which we can improve. Allies will also open new opportunities to train employees from bigger companies. In addition to that, they will reinforce our brand reputation and will endorse our methodology, raising our level of trust and visibility in the market.

We'd like to partner with MIT initiatives and Solve members. We are so interested to build relationships with innovative companies and organizations which developed training innovate programs. We want to get involved into the most innovative business community which supports up-skilling and re-skilling programas. 

We believe in our model works. Our graduation rate is unparalleled in the industry (90%+), our courses are affordable (50% below market costs), and students love them (NPS of 64). 

We do not: A) fall into the trap of believing that online courses alone will truly prepare people for highly complex jobs. It sounds scalable but it’s ineffective; B) engage with the complexities of ISAs. Our courses are sufficiently affordable that students can simply pay for them without needing financing; C) focus solely on training developers. There are significantly larger training markets than those pursued by technology bootcamps.

If Bedu gets the prize, we would be able to enhance our technology platform, improve and create more products and solutions and to develop marketing campaigns to reach out more people across the region.